Re: apt-* vs aptitude vs synaptic

["Hans-J. Ullrich" <hans.ullrich@loop.de>]

Am Mittwoch, 23. April 2008 schrieb Lennart Sorensen:
> On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 10:40:29AM +0200, Helge Hafting wrote:
> > Aptitude may be better - it sure does the job. But it spends a lot of
> > time at every invocation on "building dependency trees" and "tag
> > databases".
>
> Well yes, aptitude is a huge pig of an object oriented C++ program.
>
> > It is therefore noticeably slower than apt-get to use for simple tasks
> > like installing a single uncontroversial package. Whenever I upgrade a
> > single
> > package, I get a list of all the not-upgraded packages - I didn't ask
> > for that.
> > and when it needs to remove something (despite the better resolution)
> > I have to confirm several times instead of just once with apt-get.
>
> I do tend to use apt-get myself just because I am used to typing that
> and rather impatient.
>
> > So, better in some ways, but also much clunkier. If it needs a
> > dependency tree and a tag database almost all the time,
> > why not keep the information around in a cache? Perhaps an
> > "apt-get" or manual "dpkg" might invalidate the cache, but
> > the information should at least stay current as long as I use
> > aptitude exclusively. That'd make aptitude much more pleasant.
>
> They are cached, but also have to be updated whenever the available
> packages lists change.  Well at least some stuff is cached.

Hmm., all these answers did not really solve my problems. I wondered, why 
aptitude did another choice of installing and uninstalling packages, although 
both are using the identical database. 

And if they really do (as you will admit me), how can I make aptitude to 
behave same as apt-get (relating to the choice of packages) ?

I think, for endusers (non technical or Debian newbies), synaptic will be the 
best choice, rather than apt-* or aptitude. (For most of them, cron-apt is 
working fine, too).

I am using apt-* for easy things, aptitude for upgrades and synaptic, if I am 
searching for a string or a string in a description. (I found no way, getting 
full description and packagename with apt-*, as "apt-cache search string -f" 
only got a part of the description.)

Anyway, synaptic is working fine for this case. :)

Best regards

Hans